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Summer Idleness: Day Dreams, John William Godward, 1909

Idleness is a state of non-doing or inactivity. It can be contrasted with busyness, which is a state of doing or activity. There may be a need for balance between idleness and busyness. Just as busyness or doing can have consequences, so can idleness or non-doing. Idleness in a machine can result in rust. Idleness in an animal can have psychological or physiological consequences, such as boredom or health problems. In some times and places idleness in a person is equated with laziness or sloth and judged as a vice. In other contexts it can be judged less harshly, and seen as having virtues. Idleness can be restorative and allow recovery from busyness, and it can be expansive and allow the emergence of creativity and new ideas.

Etymology and terminology

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An idle moment by Daniel Ridgway Knight circa 1890–95

From Oxford Dictionary... idleness

From dictionary.com... [1]

  • Origin of idle... before 900; 1915–20 for def 12; Middle English, Old English īdel (adj.) empty, trifling, vain, useless; cognate with German eitel

From Merriam-Webster... idleness

  • 1. an inclination not to do work or engage in activities - "the brothersʼ innate idleness meant that neither did much"
  • 2. lack of action or activity - "a day spent in idleness is nice, but a month of doing nothing is boring"
  • 3. lack of use - the idleness of the machine was apparent by its thick layer of dust

From Middle English idel, from Old English īdel; akin to Old High German ītal worthless [2]

From Vocabulary.com Dictionary: [3]

From etymonline...

  • "Nowadays it may be hard to find the definition of idle online. We've gathered all the definitions that can be helpful for you here at Etymology-dictionary.com."
  • idle (adj.)

Old English idel "empty, void; vain; worthless, useless," from Proto-West Germanic *idla- (source also of Old Saxon idal, Old Frisian idel "empty, worthless," Old Dutch idil, Old High German ital, German eitel "vain, useless, mere, pure"), a word of unknown origin. Subsequent developments are peculiar to English: sense "not employed, not doing work" was in late Old English in reference to persons; from 1520s of things; from 1805 of machinery. Meaning "lazy, slothful" is from c. 1300. In Elizabethan English it also could mean "foolish, delirious, wandering in the mind." Idle threats preserves original sense.

  • idle (v.)

late 15c., "make vain or worthless" (trans.), from idle (adj.). Meaning "spend or waste (time)" is from 1650s. Meaning "cause to be idle" is from 1788. Intrans. sense of "run slowly and steadily without transmitting power" (as a motor) first recorded 1916. Related: Idled; idling. As a noun, 1630s of persons, 1939 of an engine setting.

  • idleness (n.)

Old English idelnes "frivolity, vanity, emptiness; vain existence;" see idle (adj.) + -ness. Old English expressed the idea we attach to in vain by in idelnisse. In late Old English it began to acquire its sense of "state of being unoccupied, doing no work, or indolent." Similar formation in Old Saxon idilnusse, Old Frisian idlenisse, Old High German italnissa. Spenser, Scott, and others use idlesse to mean "condition of being idle" in a positive sense, as a pleasure.

  • idler (n.)

"one who spends his time in inaction," 1530s, agent noun from idle (v.).

  • From The Free Dictionary
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/idleness
  • ignavia, ignavy - Idleness or sloth can be described as ignavia or ignavy.
  • otiosity - Another word for leisure or idleness.
  • boondoggle (U.S. slang term) To engage in work of little or no practical value; to look busy while accomplishing nothing.
  • twiddle one’s thumbs To idle away the time; to be extremely bored. This expression refers to the indolent pastime of playing with one’s own thumbs. The common phrase, while occasionally implying a state of involuntary inactivity, more often describes mere goofing off.
  • 1. idleness - having no employment, idling, loafing
inactivity - being inactive; being less active
dolce far niente - carefree idleness
  • 2. idleness - the quality of lacking substance or value; "the groundlessness of their report was quickly recognized"
groundlessness, worthlessness, ineptitude - having no qualities that would render it valuable or useful
  • 3. idleness - the trait of being idle out of a reluctance to work, faineance, indolence, laziness - inactivity resulting from a dislike of work
  • machines or factories that are idle are not being used
The extra power stations are idle when demand is lower.
stand/lie/sit idle: Valuable machinery is left to lie idle for long periods.
  • workers who are idle have no work
Many men were made idle as the mills closed down.
  • lazy
Get upstairs and wake up that idle brother of yours.
You’re just bone idle, the lot of you.
  • not doing anything, when there are things that you should do
Don’t worry. I have not been idle while you were away.
This country will not remain idle if its friends are attacked.
  • without a good reason or real purpose
It was only from idle curiosity that she opened the book.
  • not really intended or not likely to have any result
it didn’t sound like an idle threat to me (=it was a real threat).

From http://www.yourdictionary.com/idle

Origin of idle: Middle English idel from OE, empty, akin to German eitel, vain, empty from uncertain or unknown; perhaps Indo-European base an unverified form ai-dh, to burn, shine: basic sense, either “only apparent, seeming” or “burned out”
Origin: Old English īdel, from West Germanic *īdla-. Cognate with Dutch ijdel (“vain”), German eitel (“bare, worthless”).
  • From Bible Study Tools ...
Idle; Idleness
Both words, adjective and noun, render different Hebrew words (from `atsel, "to be lazy," raphah, "to relax," and shaqaT, "to be quiet"). According to the Yahwistic narrative Pharaoh's retort to the complaints of the Israelites was a charge of indolence (Exodus 5:8,17). It was a favorite thought of Hebrew wisdom--practical philosophy of life--that indolence inevitably led to poverty and want (Proverbs 19:15; Ecclesiastes 10:18). The "virtuous woman" was one who would not eat the "bread of idleness" (Proverbs 31:27). In Ezekiel 16:49 for the King James Version "abundance of idleness," the Revised Version (British and American) has "prosperous ease." In the New Testament "idle" generally renders the Greek word argos, literally, "inactive," "useless" (Matthew 20:3,6). In Luke 24:11 "idle talk" corresponds to one Greek word which means "empty gossip" or "nonsensical talk."

https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/idleness

  • Acedia - state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring or not being concerned with one's position or condition in the world

• Aergia - goddess in Greek mythology, personification of sloth, idleness, indolence and laziness

Aergia - https://f1.bcbits.com/img/a2324768166_10.jpg

6f6f6f

Aergia is the transliteration of the Latin Socordia, or Ignavia. She was transliterated to Greek because Hyginus mentioned her based on a Greek source, and thus can be considered as both a Greek and Roman goddess.

• Horme – Greek goddess of effort, opposite to Aergia

Opposites...

Opposite god: Hercules

From http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/christopher.hsee/vita/papers/idlenessaversion.pdf "People dread idleness, yet they need a reason to be busy" (84 citations)

Related to "doing nothing"...

British etymologists Michael Quinion, Anatoly Liberman

both pondering and loitering are associated with idleness [6]

"There is a negative connotation (or a positive one, depending on how you look at it), of being liberated from work, of being 'desoeuvre', rather than of simply being in a state of idleness or unemployment"

"Inertia comes from the Latin word, iners, meaning idle, or lazy"

"The sin of idleness shifted from a physical and spiritual taedium, or world weariness, to a disturbance of temporal regularity whose best therapy was work. ... Even the etymology of idleness attests to its original relationship to labor time." [7][1]

Chaucer: "The prologue of the tale, a treatise on the sin of idleness, provides an outer frame of piety against which to read the invocation,

Idling mechanisms

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machines...

computers...

  • Idle (CPU)
  • System Idle Process
  • idle - Computer Definition: Not processing any data. Some CPUs have an idle state that halts all processing until an interrupt is received. However, some circuits are always operating such as the refreshing of static and dynamic RAM memories, which would otherwise lose their content. [8]
  • idle character: In data communications, a character transmitted to keep the line synchronized when there is no data being sent. [9]

Idleness in animals

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Biology of idleness

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Sea slug
Sloth
Idle lion
  • Survival of the laziest
  • Evolution might favor 'survival of the laziest'...
 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180822092709.htm
 See: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2018.1292

Survival of the slackest: now that’s what I call an evolved theory... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/23/survival-evolved-theory-molluscs

selective idleness...

hibernation

Industrious fire ants reveal surprise secret to success: Selective laziness... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/08/16/industrious-fire-ants-reveal-surprise-secret-to-success-selective-laziness/

  • Industrious fire ants reveal surprise secret to success: Selective laziness...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/08/16/industrious-fire-ants-reveal-surprise-secret-to-success-selective-laziness/?utm_term=.878c27dad05d

Collective clog control: Optimizing traffic flow in confined biological and robophysical excavation...

The Greenland shark lives to four hundred years and does very little The world’s oldest living animal might also be the laziest. In what surely seems like a story we at the Idler made up, scientists have found a 400-year old shark in Greenland whose Latin name is – and again we are not making this up – Somniosus microcephalus, which translates roughly as “sleepy small-head”. This somnolent shark glides around at a leisurely pace for hundreds of years in the frigid waters around Greenland, taking in the sights and generally chilling... On the human side, it seems that laziness might also be a sign of intelligence. A recent study shows that people who scored high on a “need for cognition” scale – which estimates how much people like to think and daydream, and in general reflects intelligence – were also less physically active. In contrast to people who scored low on the “need for cognition” scale who tend to be more physically active. This could be interpreted to mean that if you are highly thoughtful person who enjoys mind wandering and daydreaming, you like also prefer lying around as opposed to darting about doing pointless tasks.

  • Evolution might favour 'survival of the laziest'...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180822092709.htm higher metabolic rates are a reliable predictor of extinction likelihood http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/285/1885/20181292

Research looking at ocean creatures like sea slugs and shellfish shows those with minimal energy requirements are more likely to prosper

Scientists looked at nearly 300 species of sea slugs and other bottom-dwelling creatures to assess the impact of pace of life on survival over millennia

from https://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/et-commentary/survival-of-the-laziest/ "If mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell were alive today, he would surely have chuckled at the thought of being proved right. Last week, biologists announced that there is evidence that evolution does not favour the fittest, it favours the laziest. In his 1932 essay, ‘In Praise of Idleness’, Russell saw work as an overrated virtue. He felt that ‘civilised living’ demanded leisure time to pursue personal interests. The recent result could well have prompted him to add the ‘longer life’ angle to his idleness argument. Though it must be mentioned that all current evidence in favour of ‘the survival of the laziest’ have come from fossilised and living mollusc species."

For those like me who are tired of being heckled for being lazy and not working hard enough, a recent study, reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that "idleness is an excellent survival strategy". Also, the sloths among us may represent the next stage in human evolution.

from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6084253/EXTINCTION-beaten-lazy-lowered-metabolic-rates.html Low maintenance' species with minimal energy requirements have survived extinction Dr Luke Strotz, also from the University of Kansas, said: 'In a sense, we're looking at a potential predictor of extinction probability. 'At the species level, metabolic rate isn't the be-all, end-all of extinction – there are a lot of factors at play. But these results say that the metabolic rate of an organism is a component of extinction likelihood. 'With a higher metabolic rate, a species is more likely to go extinct.'

"Industry & idleness" - Frank Bonilla and Ricardo Campos, 1986

Neuroscience of the idling brain

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Default mode network connectivity. This dorsal image of a human brain shows main regions of the default mode network (yellow) and connectivity between the regions color-coded by structural traversing direction (xyz -> rgb).[2][3]

Philosophy of idleness

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"There is, however, nothing wanting to the idleness of a philosopher but a better name, and that meditation, conversation, and reading should be called 'work'" ~ Jean de La Bruyère[4]

From [10] "Philosophical idleness – Wittgenstein didn't ask if mathematics is an idleness in philosophy, but the question is well taken as the assertion that the work of a philosopher is an idleness in mathematics. No one can deny that mathematics transformed by logic, which in turn transformed how philosophy is pursued today, and one may well question the value of this transformation: ie, analytical philosophy may well be mere idleness." - page 207 "Pascal know that many men find idleness unbearable. Hence a man cannot sit quietly in his room... but must go off chasing afterva ball or a hare." - page 222 "The vice of busyness – it is important not only to set time aside for idleness for the sake of relaxation, but generally to avoid busyness at all times. Busy people are always in too much of a hurry to take care of the details or even to be polite, the result being that they often accomplish little even while making a nuisance of themselves. As an expression of self-importance, busyness is our most modern vanity." – page 5

Psychology of idleness

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Idleness verses lazyness

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The deadly sin of sloth, detail from a (disputed) painting by Hieronymus Bosch ~1500. A lazy man dozes in front of the fireplace while Faith appears to him in a dream, in the guise of a nun, to remind him to say his prayers.
  • The deadly sins...

https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-24/edition-2/deadly-sins "Closely related to laziness is idleness – doing nothing. Psychologists at the University of Chicago claimed in 2010 that we’ve inherited an instinct for idleness because our ancestors had to be careful to conserve their energy. Even though we’re happier when we’re busy, Christopher Hsee and his colleagues said the idleness instinct takes over unless we have a reason not to do nothing. In fact, they even suggested governments give serious consideration to interventions such as ordering the building of pointless bridges, purely as way to lure people out of their idle stupors. Hsee’s team made their claims after a series of lab studies, including one showing that participants were happier if they took a 15-minute walk to return a questionnaire than if they just handed it in as they left the room. The trouble is, given the choice, most participants opted for the lazier return point – it was only when they were given a specious excuse (the reward of a different, though no more attractive, chocolate bar at the more distant location) that they took the walk. ‘People dread idleness, yet without a reason to be busy, they would choose idleness over busyness and be unhappy,’ says Hsee. ‘However, people will engage in activity and be busy and happy if they have a reason for doing the activity, even if the reason is specious. Sometimes, people will be happier even if they are forced to be busy rather than idle.’ Hsee notes, however, that idleness is not the same as laziness. ‘Laziness results from lack of motivation to work,’ he says, ‘whereas idleness occurs because the person has nothing to do.’ "

Idleness is not the same as laziness: "Laziness results from lack of motivation to work, whereas idleness occurs because the person has nothing to do." – Christopher Hsee (above)

Desidia, idleness, is associated with the Queen of Laziness lying on a donkey (Bruegel, 1557). "The personification of sloth, a shabbily dressed woman, demonstratively sleeps away the time in the central foreground, resting her weight on the back of an ass... the message of the inscription below [is]: "Sloth makes man powerless and dries out the nerves until man is good for nothing."[5][6]

"In the Allegory of Sloth (<– left) Queen Sloth, as we might call her, reposes against a reclining mule, her head and one shoulder nested on the Devil's oorkussen, or pillow, a proverbial attribute of Sloth. She and her followers are sunk in sleep, oblivious to the warnings of the bell ringer and the whimsical clock from which a human arm reached to point at the ominous hour of eleven: time is running out. The indolence pervading Sloth's kingdom is well suggested by the snails and slugs crawling around her, as well as by the oversize oaf in the middle ground, too lethargic, it seems, to empty his bowels without prodding from the little men in the boat."[7]

  • Dutch proverb: "ledigheid is des duivels oorkussen" (sloth is the Devil's cushion) – from [12]

"Laziness is that you don't want to work; idleness is you can't, for a while"[8]

Laziness Is More Complex Than You Think: How a More Nuanced Approach Can Help Us Overcome Laziness When Needed [13]

Bad translation from Italian Wikipedia: The sociologist Robert Castel recalls that feudal society secretes its vagabonds , its "useless to the world" that mix laziness and idleness. Living with alms, these vagrants benefit in the modern era from the social assistance of private charities but continue to be subjected to a strong repression 2 .[9]

"As lenten comes from lengthen so does sloth come from slow. It means slowness and was used as such from the 12th century. It was a synonym for the earlier unlust : a disinclination to be active or bestir oneself and thus idleness. Sex does not seem to have entered the equation, and anyway lust itself will be our seventh sin. As regards the animal kingdom it was first applied not to the megatherium, which is what the first sloths were named, but used as a collective for a group of bears or on mistaken occasion boars. The modern sloth arrives in the early 17th century with Europe’s invasion of South America. And what the playwright and cant-gatherer Thomas Dekker, in his Seven Sinnes of London, termed ‘this nastie, and loathsome sin of Sloth’ appeared in 1606."
Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue (1502) by Andrea Mantegna[10][11][12]

From Athena...

"Andrea Mantegna's 1502 painting Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue uses Athena as the personification of Graeco-Roman learning chasing the vices of medievalism from the garden of modern scholarship.[10][11][12]"

From Virtue Over Vice...

Inscribed on the landing above the water, beneath Pallas’ right foot, is another phrase that helps us unlock further details in the painting. It declares:
OTIUM SI TOLLAS PERIERE CUPDINIS ARCUS
"Eliminate idle leisure and Cupid’s bow is broken"
Cupid’s arrows inflict instant infatuation, lust, and sensations of love on anyone whom they touch, even with the slightest prick of a finger. Thus, to a certain degree, Mantegna communicates the idea that idle leisure leads to the damaging consequences of love’s spell.
In the water next to the inscription is the personification of idleness, the woman hunched over without any arms, identified with the word OTIUM. Leading idleness is another creepy woman representing inertia (and thus identified - INERTIA)."

Idleness and homelessness

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Attributed to Frans Huys (after Jheronimus Bosch): The Seven Deadly Sins or the Seven Vices - Sloth. The idlers at the right foreground are homeless.[13]

Idleness versus busyness

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Being busy all the time can create mental and physical health problems...

"Chronic busyness destroys creativity, self-knowledge, emotional well-being, our ability to be social — and it can damage our cardiovascular health". - Andrew Smart in Autopilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing.

"Neuroscientists used to believe that the brain was essentially inactive when we were doing nothing. But recent research has revealed that idleness actually supercharges our brains. According to researcher Andrew Smart, idleness means “a healthier, happier, more creative brain.” In many ways, it’s like sleep: easy to skip, but vital to our health and success."

  • Embracing Idleness [14]
"As Burkeman demonstrated, contemporary political rhetoric suggests there is little worse than being idle... And yet, for all that coalition-spun charm, most of us value the merit of hard work whether or not we enjoy it, simply because it seems more noble than sitting around on your arse doing as little as possible. The irony, of course, is that we also dream of enjoying idleness, imagining a hazy vision of our future selves lying on a beach doing sweet nothing."
  • Yang, A.X. and Hsee, C.K. (2018) "Idleness versus Busyness". Current opinion in psychology. 26: 15–18. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.04.015 pdf
"People often say they work hard so that they can be idle. Increasing empirical evidence suggests an alternative interpretation — we work hard to avoid being idle"
  • Hsee, C.K., Yang, A.X. and Wang, L. (2010) "Idleness aversion and the need for justifiable busyness". Psychological Science, 21(7): 926–930. doi:10.1177/0956797610374738 PDF
Abstract: "There are many apparent reasons why people engage in activity, such as to earn money, to become famous, or to advance science. In this report, however, we suggest a potentially deeper reason: People dread idleness, yet they need a reason to be busy. Accordingly, we show in two experiments that without a justification, people choose to be idle; that even a specious justification can motivate people to be busy; and that people who are busy are happier than people who are idle. Curiously, this last effect is true even if people are forced to be busy. Our research suggests that many purported goals that people pursue may be merely justifications to keep themselves busy."
  • Idleness breeds misery; busyness generates happiness.
  • People need justifications to be busy.
  • Many purported goals that people pursue may be mere justifications to be busy.
  • when busyness subsides, space can open
  • "A Lament against Incessant Business" - Henry David Thoreau

From Get Busy and Get Happy: In defense of busywork "Incidentally, thinking deeply or engaging in self-reflection counts as keeping busy, too. You don't need to be running around, - you just need to be engaged, either physically or mentally. As Victor Hugo once wrote, "A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor." Keep those mental wheels turning if you don't want to keep your feet moving."

  • On n’est pas inoccupé parce qu’on est absorbé. Il y a le labeur visible et le labeur invisible.
    • A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labour and there is an invisible labour.
    • Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), book 7, chapter 8

Idleness verses boredom

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ISBN 9789042025660. [15]

The essay traces the historical manifestations of boredom in the West from Attic Greece to the modern age, examining the decline in political participation through a wide historical lens, and attributing it to a transformation in Western culture that began under the Roman Empire. It identifies an externalization of responsibility for self-cultivation and management that began to occur in the period between the classical Greek era and the imperial culture of Rome and its mandate of obedience.

"Boredom is often simply a state of awareness that shows up just prior to the surfacing of difficult, painful things we have stuffed away from our conscious awareness..."

From What If We Have It Wrong About Boredom? "Boredom has long been regarded as a negative mental state. Indeed, it plays a pivotal role in one of the earliest surviving literary works, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. It tells the tale of the Mesopotamian King Uruk, who finds himself ‘oppressed by idleness.’ This state of ennui is then the premise for the entire story, since it prompts Uruk to embark upon a quest to discover some sense of purpose, and to build a legacy worthy of his name. That said, the word itself is fairly new. It only entered the English language in 1852, when Charles Dickens creatively adapted the verb ‘to bore’ – to pierce or wear down – in his novel Bleak House. And indeed it was a bleak mental state that Dickens sought to depict with this word. Lady Dedlock is frequently found lamenting that she is ‘bored to death’ with her life. And as we can perhaps all recognise, the word typically depicts a listless state of malaise – some dispiriting combination of frustration, surfeit, sadness, disgust, indifference, apathy, and confinement. Basically, in the words of Orrin Klapp[1], boredom is a ‘deficit in the quality of life.’"

"oppressed by idleness" - [https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=agjLXHJo9bgC&pg=PT65&lpg=PT65&dq=Gilgamesh+%22oppressed+by+idleness%22&source=bl&ots=LDyaYdaRC-&sig=pGbP4juhKzalKhP9Nr6Yr8q4ugs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiozeSWr7jdAhVF7lQKHSimC7UQ6AEwDHoECBsQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22oppressed%20by%20idleness%22&f=false The Epic of Gilgamesh Chapter 2: The Forest Journey".

Effortlessness

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Literature

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Idleness ... does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

related...

Books

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"Idleness in Victorian England represents a moral danger but, at the same time, it offers some allure, suggesting a world of pleasure beyond the demand for industriousness and prosperity"

... "ambivalent attitude towards idleness"

- Three new books on idleness say that toiling and spinning are distinctly overrated...

  • In Praise of Wasting Time – Alan Lightman

Review from Spectator (above): "... published by Ted, purveyors of positive thinking for go-getters, and in the tradition of that series of online lectures, takes a few platitudes and spins them into an ‘inspirational’ guide for corporate ladder-climbers... cites Mahler, Jung and Einstein as great achievers who used the power of idleness to work harder and achieve more. The author, a novelist, goes on to repeat a few familiar observations about today’s teenagers being hyperconnected and always on social media and so on. Downtime, by contrast, would lead to creative insights and give us a rest... correctly identifies the Puritans as the progenitors of today’s anti-idling ethic. And, predictably, he recommends mindfulness as a solution. Compulsory mindfulness in schools is an idea that he moots. It seems that mindfulness is proposed as the answer to pretty much every social problem these days. I note that a new mindfulness app called Calm has just been valued at $250 million by Silicon Valley investors keen to make a fortune by selling Buddhism to the very people they stressed out with their anxiety-inducing technology."

Review from Spectator (above):

"The anxieties of idleness : idleness in eighteenth-century British literature and culture" - Sarah Jordan, 2003 "This book investigates the preoccupation with idleness that haunts the British eighteenth century, arguing that as Great Britain began to define itself as a nation during this period, one important quality it claimed was industriousness. Because this claim was undermined and complicated by many factors, such as leisure's importance to class status, idleness was a subject of intense anxiety. Jordan analyzes how the "idleness" of the working classes, the nonwhite races, and women is figured, and she examines the lives and works of two writers especially obsessed with idleness."

- "Boredom is not a question of idleness but of meaning" – page 35 - "For Leopardi boredom is reserved for noble souls; 'the mob' can, at best, only suffer from simple idleness" – page 58 - "... it is easy to work, whereas genuine idleness is really demanding on a human being" – Johann Georg Hamann (paraphrase) page 55 - Acedia: We saw earlier that Kierkegaard described boredom as 'the root of all evil'. In doing so, he was in accordance with medieval theology, where acedia was considered a particularly grievous sin, since all other sins sprang from it. The concept of acedia has a complicated history that stretches for over a millennium, from is beginnings in antiquity through to the late medieval period, at which time it was ousted by the new concept of melancholy. The surviving accounts of acedia, mainly by Christian thinkers in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, correspond to a great extent to what we know as boredom, with indifference and idleness as important characteristics. A crucial difference is that acedia is first and foremost a moral concept, whereas 'boredom', in the normal sense of the word, more describes a psychological state. Another difference is that acedia was for the few, whereas boredom afflicts the masses. – pages 48–50 - "There are words in ancient Greek for idleness (eg, skhole, alys and argos) and for a kind of satiety of blase state of mind (eg koros), but hardly anything that wholly corresponds to out concept of boredom." – page 50

-> on Aristotle and idleness

Essays

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  • Montaigne Essay: Of Idleness

http://essaysbymontaigne.blogspot.com/2012/03/book-1-chapter-8-of-idleness.html "The soul that has no established aim loses itself... Like a horse broken free of its rider, my mind is beset with all kinds of phantasms and monsters, ‘one upon another, without order or design"

  • State of Inaction - A Perspective on Idleness - The Resolute Gentleman

https://resolutegent.com/inaction/

Ancient Greco-Roman

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"In ancient Greece the time of idleness, referred to as σχολή (scholè), that is, the attention given to contemplation and participation as spectators in theatrical, sports and political activities, assumes a positive connotation linked to knowledge and intellectual meditation conducted, or rather, recognised as a privilege only of the aristocratic and dominant classes. Excluded from this context were naturally all those who performed manual and strenuous labour. Unlike in classical Rome the judgment or the value attributed to ‘free time‘ or period for reflection and entertainment, takes on various forms: for the philosopher Seneca, author of “De otio“, once again the term refers to the idea of a secluded existence, unaffected by the ‘corruption‘ of contemporary customs; the same attitude is expressed by Cicero and Horace with the invitation to pick the daily fruits that life can offer; contrarily, according to Cato the Elder, as is well known, idleness is the harbinger of vices and is the cause of the loss of values that span Roman society, also among the lower social classes that were able to access the free distribution of food and thus, even effortlessly, fulfil their basic needs.
"Since then, and with the spread throughout the Western world of Christianity, free time and therefore the time of idleness has always been generally lived with a negative sense, or at least opposed to the time of work considered both in Marxist philosophy and by the devotees of the free market, as the foundation of all existence.
"Nevertheless, with the consolidation in the post-industrial society of higher living standards, the issue is experienced in less ideological terms. Vacation time, and likewise how to live and enjoy one’s leisure time, constitutes, beyond all contradiction, the opportunity to reflect fully upon the discipline of architecture..."
  • I live an idle burden to the ground.
  • "Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace" - Hesiod
  • Strenua nos exercet inertia.
    • Busy idleness urges us on.
    • Horace, Epistles, Book I, XI. 28. Same idea in Phædrus, Fables, II. V. 3: Seneca—De Brevitate Vitæ, Chapter XIII and XV.
  • Vitanda est improba syren—desidia.
    • That destructive siren, sloth, is ever to be avoided.
    • Horace, Satires, II. 3. 14.
  • Variam semper dant otia mentem.
  • Cernis ut ignavum corrumpant otia corpus
    Ut capiant vitium ni moveantur aquæ.
    • Thou seest how sloth wastes the sluggish body, as water is corrupted unless it moves.
    • Ovid, Epistolæ Ex Ponto, I. 5. 5.
  • "The invention of money opened a new field to human avarice by giving rise to usury and the practice of lending money at interest while the owner passes a life of idleness" - Pliny the Elder
  • On the Shortness of Life – Seneca
  • Google search on "Marcus Aurelius idleness"
  • Google search on "Seneca idleness"
busy idleness

From Seneca on busyness as idleness... the idea that busyness isn’t really productive, but is a form of distraction [18]

"In his philosophic writings Seneca seeks to distinguish sharply between otium (leisure) and ignavia (idleness or sloth). He vividly contrasts the life of leisure (vita otiosa) with the idle life (occupatio desidiosa), stressing the immense difference between the two. The vita ignava is detestable; it causes man to hate his life; it is a deadly punishment. The Philosopher urges his fellow-men to avoid indolent or idle inaction that is comparable to a living death. Moreover, he likewise emphasizes the futility and absurdity of a life devoted to busy idleness. Those who are “out of breath for no purpose, always busy about nothing” do not have leisure but idle occupation– “Non habent isti otium, sed iners negotium.” Their way of life may be compared to the aimless meanderings of ants. They crawl about frantically with no fixed goal, consuming their time in meaningless diversions which weary them to no purpose. Seneca picturesquely portrays these human beings breathlessly absorbed in the manifold activities they happen to stumble upon." - Anna Lydia Motto and John R. Clark (1978) "'Hic Situs Est': Seneca on the Deadliness of Idleness", The Classical World, 72(4): 207-215. doi:10.2307/4349035

Novels

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  • [19] <- translate
  • Oblomovism - Ivan Goncharov's novel Oblomov, published in 1859, depicts a lazy man who gives his name to the book and whose only goal in life is not to leave his couch. It is not presented in a negative but more ambivalent way. The Oblomov character also gives his name to Oblomovism, a mixture of idleness and reverie.[15]

Poems

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Illustration for The Castle of Indolence, a poem by James Thomson[16]
The Fountain of Indolence, J. M. W. Turner, 1834
  • God loves an idle rainbow,
    No less than laboring seas.
    • Ralph Hodgson, Three Poems, as quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 655
  • Ralph Hodgson Poems on Idleness
  • Belacqua - Dante's Belacqua is punished for the sin of idleness. Samuel Beckett, whose favorite reading was Dante, closely identified with Belacqua and his indolence.
  • In Praise of Idleness – by Paul Violi

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57682/in-praise-of-idleness

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/tears-idle-tears

A Dream of Idleness pages 5–22.

Tree of Idleness

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The Tree of Idleness, Lawrence Durrell
  • The Tree of Idleness – Lawrence Durrell

https://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/Week-of-Mon-20070716/002597.html "The title of this poem is taken from the name of the tree which stands outside Bellapaix Abbey in Cyprus, and which confers the gift of pure idleness on all who sit under it."

Tree of Idleness
  • Tree of Idleness restaurant is situated under a 200 year old Robenia tree. This is the same tree under which author Lawrence Durrell wrote his autobiographical book “Bitter Lemons of Cyprus”...

The Tree of Idleness is the title of a poem in 1955 written by Lawrence Durrell about his life in Bellapaix.[17]

Durrell expains, "The title of this poem is taken from the name of the tree which stands outside Bellapaix Abbey in Cyprus, and which confers the gift of pure idleness on all who sit under it."[18]

The nearby village of Bellapais has since gained fame with the publication of writer Lawrence Durrell's book Bitter Lemons (1957), in which Durrell writes of drinking coffee under the 'Tree of Idleness' where he lived[19]

Anatolian

A new tree on the site under which Durrell sat. [20]

Academic articles

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  • Wagner, A., 1985. Idleness and the Ideal of the Gentlemen. History of Education Quarterly, 25(1-2), pp. 41–55.
  • Golding, R., Bosch, P. and Wilkes, J. (1995) "Idleness is not sloth". Proceedings of the USENIX 1995 Technical Conference pages 201–212.
  • Does happiness lead into idleness - H Verkley, J Stolk - 1989
https://personal.eur.nl/veenhoven/Pub1980s/89a-C8-full.pdf

Magazine articles, opinion, opeds and blogs

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  • From: In praise of idle hands: Underemployed and unashamed in America, Salon, 22 June 2018 [21]
"In the case of Lloyd Dobler, there was the added resonance of idleness as political stance, for I too loathed the "occupation" of production and consumption, that hamster wheel attempt to outrun death.

The Idler

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https://idler.co.uk/articles/

The Idler is a biyearly British magazine devoted to promoting its ethos of "idle living" and all that entails. It was founded in 1993 by Tom Hodgkinson and Gavin Pretor-Pinney with the intention of exploring alternative ways of working and living.

from https://idler.co.uk/about/ Back in 1991, bored to tears by his job, 23 year old journalist Tom Hodgkinson lay on his bed and dreamed of starting a magazine called The Idler. He’d found the title in a collection of essays by Dr Johnson, himself a constitutionally indolent man. How to live, that was the question. How to be free in a world of jobs and debt? And curse this alarm clock. The magazine has since enjoyed a number of incarnations. In the nineties it was published by the Guardian newspaper, then by Ebury publishing. Tom published the Idler as an annual collection of essays until 2014, then relaunched the mag in 2016.

Music

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Idleness versus work

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Demonising the poor, legitimating the well-off... Bridewell prison, as depicted by William Hogarth
"But, there is a strange undercurrent to Hogarth's images, as the art historian Ronald Paulson pointed out in a classic study of his works. For the industrious apprentice does not really win our love. As he rises, he shrinks. There is something prissy about the way he gives charity to the poor, and in the Tyburn scene he is just a cold little face watching the execution of his old friend from inside his carriage. Meanwhile, the features of the idle wastrel are tragic, empathetic. Hogarth's sympathies are not as obvious as they first appear."

"The proposed remedy for idleness is work, the discipline of exercise which makes it possible to restore health. The disease of laziness poses a threat to culture through its decadent effeminization, its unmanning effect. This is a far cry from Hercules, the robust hero of labor." [24]

-* Does everyone really need a job? Why we should question full employment

Protestant work ethic

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"Life on the go was invented much earlier, in 1517, by a certain Martin Luther: theologian, seminal founder of the Protestant Church, and great fan of hard work and frugality. Max Weber applied his ideas to economics, and coined the term Protestant work ethic as the driving force behind the rise of capitalism, social success and wealth in northern Europe... In 1932, Bertrand Russell wrote a fiery essay “In Praise of Idleness,” in which he argued that our society had come to attribute so great a value to work that it had forgotten its right to leisure. He acknowledged that work was good - a noble, democratizing concept that incites all men to produce and to contribute - but it was “emphatically not one of the ends of human life.” The end of human life, is to live. To find a place for pleasure for its own sake. To make time for idleness, and in it, to cultivate happiness through personal growth."

"In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving." - Bertrand Russel"

Puritans

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  • Puritan scorn for idleness
  • "The Puritan doctrine advocated a life intent on avoiding idle action.[21] ... Sport was often considered a form of leisurely or idle activity, and therefore a vice."

The idle poor

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...the stigma against idleness and what is seen as nature’s or God's punishment of idleness in the form of destitution and starvation

The idle rich

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Forced idleness

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"I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spend in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days. In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot." – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

- eg in hospital or prison

  • Forced idleness costs US employers $100 billion a year — Quartz

https://index.qz.com/1194803/forced-idleness-costs-us-employers-100-billion-a-year/

  • Study: Idleness Costs Companies $100B a Year

https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-professional/article/study-idleness-costs-companies-100b-a-year-020218

  • Isaiah 19:10 - Dispirited, depressed in their forced idleness - everyone who works for a living, jobless

https://www.biblestudytools.com/msg/isaiah/19-10.html

  • forced idleness, persons who were willing to work, but who could find no employment whatsoever

https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=JXstAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA487&lpg=PA487&dq=%22forced+idleness%22&source=bl&ots=IQFORmLr9G&sig=4y-DLPgV1aql911PFWCrACRUgtc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwixxN7d0J7dAhXzGzQIHQ45CmQQ6AEwFHoECFUQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22forced%20idleness%22&f=false

  • Cassandra: Florence Nightingale's Angry Outcry Against the Forced Idleness of Victorian Women (book)

https://www.amazon.com/Cassandra-Florence-Nightingales-Idleness-Victorian/dp/091267055X Nightingale denounces the lives of idleness she and other women of her class were forced to lead.

  • Problems of older people: forced idleness, impoverishment, ill health, isolation

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1807129/

  • "...forced idleness is far worse than forced labor, because forced idleness is equivalent to a person being pressured to possess an even field structure by outside forces."

https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=B9eqmWnCcSsC&pg=PA379&lpg=PA379&dq=%22forced+idleness%22&source=bl&ots=SrYAf5goPy&sig=d69JV9hz5mmpxkpxAv_lg2gSKKY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwixxN7d0J7dAhXzGzQIHQ45CmQQ6AEwGnoECE8QAQ#v=onepage&q=%22forced%20idleness%22&f=false

  • A man makes a universal gesture indicating boredom, impatience or forced idleness

https://www.videoblocks.com/video/a-man-makes-a-universal-gesture-indicating-boredom-impatience-or-forced-idleness-it76o5k

  • Occupation too long continued is destructive to happiness, but idleness is not less so; and it may well be doubted whether the compulsive labor of the slaves is any more copious a source of misery than the forced idleness of the masters. I say forced idleness, for in depriving themselves of the motives to labor and exertion, they force themselves to be idle."

https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=ISVcAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA149&lpg=PA149&dq=%22forced+idleness%22&source=bl&ots=DzHZxoxD6j&sig=SuEwtxmBmPXIPuEGJ1LaO41HVro&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwixxN7d0J7dAhXzGzQIHQ45CmQQ6AEwH3oECEoQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22forced%20idleness%22&f=false

  • forced idleness creates so much time to Do Nothing: to say nothing, to sit and think, observe and digest. In fact, having nothing to do for long enough makes you realize that Doing Nothing is actually a fruitful activity.

https://www.oxfordamerican.org/item/1448-doing-nothing

Idleness as political subversion

[edit]

From French Wikipedia... "From the point of view of considering work as a value, the cult of idleness and idleness appears as a really subversive attitude: if everyone stopped working, or at least made it the centre of its activity, the social, economic and cultural consequences would be considerable. This view of praising laziness is echoed by many authors, including Paul Lafargue in The Right to Laziness, Bertrand Russell or someone like Gébé. It has been claimed, in particular, by the actors of the Western protest movements born in the 1940s and 1950s (such as Bob Black), beginning with the hippies or the sixty-eight."

The right to idleness

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"The right to be lazy" – essay by the Cuban-born French revolutionary Marxist Paul Lafargue See...

In 1972, the church historian Ernst Benz published on Lafargue's "The Right to Laziness" and discusses a theology of laziness

"The Abolition of Work" - Bob Black's most widely read essay, See...

Friedrich Nietzsche was a notable philosopher who presented a critique of work and an anti-work ethic.

Cynic philosophical school - Diogenes of Sinope, "the Dog"

Sadhus, "Hobos", "tramps", and "bums"

Morality and judgement

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As punishment

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Pain of idleness

[edit]

In Christianity

[edit]

"Christian morality counts seven major vices (sloth, greed, gluttony, envy, wrath, lust, and pride), also called the seven deadly sins. These mortal offenses, which correspond to the seven circles of Hell described in Dante's Inferno, condemn man to eternal damnation... In the medieval era, every vice has its corresponding animal... for sloth the ass... The culture of the age encouraged, moreover, an allegorical reading of the major epic poems of antiquity, assigning each of the gods and heroes a specific moral connotation. Ambiguous deities such as Pan, Dionysus, and Eros, but also hybrid figure such as the satyrs and centaurs or monsters such as the sirens and Gorgons, assumed strongly negative connotations, as they represented natural and psychic energies nearly irreconcilable with the Christian universe and its focus on salvation in the afterlife.[22]

In politics

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In law

[edit]

Leisure

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The Land of Cockaigne, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1567
Dolce Far Niente (sweet idleness), John William Waterhouse 1880

"Idleness is often romanticized, as epitomized by the Italian expression dolce far niente (‘it is sweet to do nothing’). Many people tell themselves that they work hard from a desire for idleness. But although our natural instinct is for idleness, most of us find prolonged idleness difficult to bear." [25]

Idleness and creativity

[edit]
  • Idleness and Creativity: Poetic Disquisitions on Idleness in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

[26]

"Here’s a novel concept: Doing nothing is as productive — maybe even more productive — as doing something. This is according to a couple of university professors. As Daniel J. Levitin wrote in the New York Times, “Several studies have shown that a walk in nature or listening to music can trigger the mind-wandering mode. This acts as a neural reset button, and provides much needed perspective on what you’re doing. Daydreaming leads to creativity.”"

Idleness and pleasure

[edit]
Love-in-idleness, the wild pansy, was thought in Elizabethan times to be a highly potent love potion
Love in Idleness
Laziness, lithograph by Félix Vallotton, 1896

Idleness is sometimes associated with sensuality, with repose and idle reverie...

  • "Eros indeed, we are told, loves idleness and is born only for the idle." – Thomas Mann in Death of Venice
  • Love in Idleness - another name for the wild pansy

From Viola tricolor... "According to Roman mythology, the wild pansy turned into the Love-in-idleness as Cupid shot one of his arrows at the imperial votaress, but missed and instead struck it. As Cupid is the god of desire, affection and erotic love, the flower’s juice received the trait, to act as a love potion. Its name relates to the use of the flower, as it is often used for idleness or vileness acts."

"According to Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the secret to a highly potent love potion lies in the purple, yellow and white wild flower, "love-in-idleness". "The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid/will make man or woman madly dote/upon the next live creature that it sees," the fairy king tells Puck. Four hundred years later, scientists have put it to the test."[23]

"the potent love potion that Puck uses to cause Titania to fall in love with Bottom."

Idleness and aesthetics

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Cultivated idleness

[edit]

Idleness of faith

[edit]

Sacred idleness

[edit]

Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness. – George MacDonald (mentor of Lewis Carroll)

Slowing down and doing less

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Doing nothing

[edit]
  • Five reasons why we should all learn how to do nothing [27]
"Doing nothing” isn’t really doing nothing... what’s usually meant by “doing nothing” is doing nothing useful. The problem is that “useful” gets defined in ways that don’t always serve our interests. Working harder to earn more to buy more stuff is useful for the people selling the stuff – but not necessarily for you. And usefulness is intrinsically future-oriented: it yanks you from the present, making savouring impossible. So perhaps “doing nothing” is synonymous with feeling alive."
"the well-studied “incubation effect”: ceasing to focus on a project seems to give your unconscious permission to get to work. "
According to "the Dutch work expert Manfred Kets de Vries, busyness “can be a very effective defence mechanism for warding off disturbing thoughts and feelings”. It’s when doing nothing that we finally confront what matters."
"But neuroscientists are increasingly finding that our brains depend on downtime – not just for recharging batteries, but to process that data we’re deluged with, to consolidate memory and reinforce learning, by strengthening the neural pathways that make such feats possible. In one 2009 study, brain imaging suggested that people faced with a strange task – controlling a computer joystick that didn’t obey the usual rules – were actively coming to grips with learning this new skill during seemingly passive rest periods."
"Don’t expect doing nothing to feel easy at first: resisting the urge to do things takes willpower. In Buddhism, according to the meditation instructor Susan Piver, “busyness is seen as a form of laziness”

"Scientists of happiness have proved beyond any doubt that once our basic needs are met, well-being does not increase with more money, or stuff, or a big reputation. This is the American nightmare, haunting the McMansions of this greedy land. More is almost never more. Half is almost always plenty."

The Italians have a concept for piddling around known as [La Dolce Far Niente], which means, the sweetness of doing nothing.

  • I've discovered the virtues of idleness - Henry Porter [29]

- Doing nothing – "the insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour", as Washington Irving wrote of his indolent hero Rip Van Winkle – can be deceptive. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the last prince of an ancient Sicilian line, appeared to do nothing for most of his life, an impression supported by his reserve and profound melancholy. But he was one of the most knowledgeable scholars of European literature, which he read in five or six languages, and in the last three years of his life he wrote one of the great works of the 20th century, The Leopard.

- To do nothing is also to deliberate, to contemplate Santayana's list of the world's redeeming qualities in which he noted, "the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns." I appreciate that this sounds like the cheesy motto of a Californian self-help website, but if we are to save the Earth's atmosphere and stop the great extinction of species, it is clear that we should learn to do much less, and so more, with our lives.

‘All man’s miseries,’ wrote the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, ‘derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.’


  • Wilde, Oscar (1891), The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing.

Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister, extolled the virtues of ‘masterful inactivity.’

  • -As chairman and CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch spent an hour each day in what he called ‘looking out of the window time.’.

Robots and artificial intelligence

[edit]

Some individual views

[edit]

Virgil

[edit]
  • Vickers, Brian (1990) ["Leisure and Idleness in the Renaissance: the Ambivalence of Otium"] Renaissance Studies, 4(2): 107–154.

"The true nature of idleness he will know in time, by continuing to be idle. Virgil tells us of an impetuous and rapid being, that acquires strength by motion."[30]

Chaucer

[edit]
The Pilgrim at the Gate of Idleness. Edward Burne-Jones, 1884
  • Gate of Idleness - Chaucer

"Poverty waits at the gate of idleness" - English proverb

  • The Ass and the Pig - Aesop's Fable
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream - uses a magical juice derived from a flower called "love-in-idleness," which turns from white to purple when struck by Cupid's arrow. When the concoction is applied to the eyelids of a sleeping person, that person, upon waking, falls in love with the first living thing he perceives. The flower in the concoction is the Viola tricolor, the wild pansy, the progenitor of the cultivated pansy.

Confucus

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"During Confucian times, idleness was an important part of Chinese culture. A Confucian gentleman grew long fingernails to prove that he did not have to work with his hands. Confucianism actually “idealized leisure and effortlessness”. The key, as with most things in life, is achieving balance between activity and idleness. One without the other is, in the long run, neither productive nor healthy... The latest neuroscience suggests that while our brains are wired for action and intensity, our brains need time to rest if we are to be at our best on a sustainable basis."

Kamo no Chōmei

[edit]
Kamo no Chōmei, by Kikuchi Yōsai

Yoshida Kenkō

[edit]
Yoshida Kenkō

• Tsurezuregusa • Yoshida Kenkō

Yoshida Kenkō, whose Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa, 1332) sparkles with aesthetic insights: "It does not matter how young or strong you may be, the hour of death comes sooner than you expect. It is an extraordinary miracle that you should have escaped to this day; do you suppose you have even the briefest respite in which to relax? " See commentary: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-aesthetics

Hieronymus Bosch

[edit]

"Bosch, like other medieval burghers, held up the poor as examples of sin and folly, often portraying them as symbols of idleness and sloth".

The bagpipe is a symbol of “sloth and idleness.

"The Ship of Fools is crewed by a colourful band of revellers who take their pleasure from food and drink, flirting and music. An owl gazes down on the carefree company from the green branches lashed to the top of the boat’s mast. The men and women are unaware, however, that their sinful behaviour is being observed as they devote their time to idleness and earthly amusement."

In The Seven Deadly Sins(c. 4180), idleness is represented by a woman dressed up for for church and trying to wake a man deep in slumber."[33]

Isaac Watts

[edit]
Isaac Watts in his essay "Against Idleness and Mischief" used the bee as a model of hard work. Lewis Carroll parodied the essay in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

"For Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do." - Isaac Watts in his essay "Against Idleness and Mischief" used the bee as a model of hard work

In his 1865 fantasy Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll parodies both "Against Idleness and Mischief" as "How Doth the Little Crocodile"[24] and "The Sluggard" as "'Tis the Voice of the Lobster".[25]

  • 'Tis the voice of the sluggard, I heard him complain:
    "You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again";
    As the door on its hinges, so he on his bed,
    Turns his sides, and his shoulders and his heavy head.[26]

Samuel Johnson

[edit]
Samuel Johnson

The 18th-century English writer, Samuel Johnson, wrote "a number of essays on the benefits of being idle. Idleness, he claimed, “may be enjoyed without injury to others”. Johnson saw idleness as “a silent and peaceful quality, that neither raises envy…nor hatred”."

“If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.” ― Samuel Johnson , The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 3

  • "If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle."

“The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.” ― Samuel Johnson

"There is no kind of idleness by which we are so easily seduced as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business." - Samuel Johnson

"To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavours with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself" - Samuel Johnson

  • Idleness is a disease that must be combated —Samuel Johnson
  • As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy —Samuel Johnson

William Hazlitt

[edit]

Søren Kierkegaard

[edit]

Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only good – Soren Kierkegaard

"In itself, idleness is not at all a root of all evil, but on the contrary an almost divine life, as long as one is not bored." - Søren Kierkegaard

(In a provocative passage Kierkegaard suggests that boredom is the root of all evil. He contrasts boredom with idleness.)

"Far from being the root of all evil, idleness is the only true good. Boredom is the root of all evil, and so it must be kept at a distance. Idleness is not evil." - Søren Kierkegaard

Oscar Wilde

[edit]

The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach – Oscar Wild

"To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual" – Oscar Wilde

Bertrand Russell

[edit]
Bertrand Russell

In Praise of Idleness - Bertrand Russell http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bertrand-russell-in-praise-of-idleness-11-02-05-22-00-46

Afterword: In praise of doubt

  • "The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich." - Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1932).
  • "A great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work." (Bertrand Russell; In Praise Of Idleness).
  • The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
  • Without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.
  • Bertrand Russell's 10 lessons for a creative, happy life – in pictures [35]

Brian O'Connor

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Idleness: A Philosophical Essay

"The first book to challenge modern philosophy’s case against idleness, revealing why the idle state is one of true freedom" https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11280.html - an alternative and altogether refreshing take on our favourite deadly sin - to what extent is an idle life a good life? Book review: 'Idleness: A Philosophical Essay' by Brian O’Connor... https://www.tulsaworld.com/scene/books/book-review-idleness-a-philosophical-essay-by-brian-o-connor/article_330286a1-de38-5aa2-991e-d6da84e3c1ac.html

Bullshit review: "the first book to challenge modern philosophy's case against idleness"

Review from Spectator (above): "... an academic study of idleness and is very deep, way deep, so deep in fact as to be virtually unreadable. It seems aimed at a very specialist audience of tweedy professors and dons. And the kind of person who has read Herbert Marcuse.

Take for example this sentence chosen at random: ‘The objectivity of what we take ourselves to be is established through patterns of social interaction that we have seen Hegel define in the dialectic of master and slave as “recognition”.’

It is not, however, without charm. The author, a professor at Trinity College, Dublin, explores various philosophical treatments of idleness. He argues that Robert Burton, author of the bestselling self-help book of the 17th century, An Anatomy of Melancholy, whose success shows that depression is not a modern ailment, was against it. Burton reckoned it would lead to excessive brooding. It was better to keep busy and avoid introspection. ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’ was Burton’s injunction for depressives. Women are advised to amuse themselves with ‘curious Needle-workes’ and men should read books.

The author unfortunately leaves out one of the great idlers of all time, Dr Johnson. The great lexicographer and depressive was a fan of Burton’s book but altered its anti-idling message and adapted it into the more humane and convivial: ‘When solitary, be not idle. When idle, be not solitary.’

When the author has quite exhausted us with his talk of Hegelian dialectic and Kant-ian ethics, he introduces the blessedly chatty voice of Robert Louis Stevenson, who was pro-idling, and in the end he makes a good argument for idleness as freedom and not as a sort of bovine passivity — which is how Kant saw it."

  • O'Connor, B., 2014. Play, Idleness and the Problem of Necessity in Schiller and Marcuse. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 22(6), pp.1095-1117.
  • O’Connor, B., 2013. Idleness, Usefulness and Self-Constitution. Critical Horizons, 14(2), pp.181-199. pdf

Miscellaneous

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"many men find idleness unbearable"

"our favourite deadly sin" (perhaps Lust is the better candidate)

"The vice of busyness" "demoralisation through idleness"

"And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made." – Genesis 2:2-4 KJV

'The absence of Labour - idleness - was a condition of Adam's blessedness before the Fall,' wrote Tolstoy. Those born after, are 'cursed to seek...

From https://uxdesign.cc/embracing-the-idle-mind-43067637395c "An idle mind will seek a toy Already Friedrich Nietzsche saw boredom as the “unpleasant calm that precedes creative acts”. Neuroscientists and psychologists, like Jerome Singer, back up Nietzsche’s claims helping to explain what exactly happens when the brain is bored: When we do not have anything to do, our brain tries to escape the feeling of boredom. We shift into a mode of internal stimulation, commonly referred to as mind-wandering, where we refrain from task-related, focused thought. When our mind wanders our brain switches from “focused mode” into “diffuse mode” which increases activity in many regions of the brain. "He who fortifies himself completely against boredom fortifies himself against himself too. He will never drink the most powerful elixir from his own innermost spring". — Friedrich Nietzsche These areas have been linked to high levels of openness to experience and divergent thinking — two common traits of highly creative people. And of course, the higher our level of creativity, the better we become at thinking outside the box and at developing effective solutions to difficult situations.... The increased creative output in “diffuse mode” explains why revelations sometimes do not come to us when we are pondering about a tough problem, but actually when we manage to forget about it for a brief moment. This is how such “Eureka!” moments under the shower can be explained, when it feels like a solution came to us out of nowhere."

From * ARTSPEAK: The Importance Of Being Idle Lin Yutang writes in his influential essay The Importance of Living that "loafing is considered to be productive, not unproductive, because it is the foundations on which culture, art and wisdom are produced and which places more importance on being than on doing or possessing."

According to Lin Yutang, “From the Chinese point of view, the man who is wisely idle is the most cultured man. For there seems to be a philosophic contradiction between being busy and being wise. Those who are wise won’t be busy, and those who are too busy can’t be wise. The wisest man is therefore he who loafs most gracefully. We must not allow the art of living to degenerate into the mere business of living.”

"The word for leisure in Greek is ‘skole’ from which is derived the English word ‘school’ — a place where we educate and teach. We are more used to thinking of idleness as the opposite of education, the opposite of employment. But it is mindfully cultivated idleness that created space for epic poems, the scholarship of medieval monasteries as Shakespeare’s plays, Jane Austen’s novels and Ghalib’s ghazals."

"Showing honour to what is valued is always unfolded slowly: Qirat recitation of the Quran, the measured steps of a funeral procession, a long driveway up to a stately home, and the many steps up to courts of justice... Carlo Petrini’s protest against fast food at the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in Rome in 1986 inspired the slow food movement that has spread to many countries and to a more generalised ‘Slow Movement’ with activities from farming to art."

bone-idle

Quotes

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It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top – Virginia Woolf

Beware of idleness and laziness in old age – Albert Schweitzer

Idleness is the parent of psychology – Friedrich Nietzsche

Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible – Mahatma Gandhi

"Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues" – Franz Kafka

Of all faults, idleness is excused most easily – La Rochefoucauld

"Foul darkness" is the natural setting of Satan: in the medieval Latin tradition of the seven deadly sins, acedia has generally been folded into the sin of sloth.

"Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease" – Benjamin Franklin

"Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger" - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Convent - a place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness" - Ambrose Bierce

"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top" - Virginia Woolf

"Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present" - Cyril Connolly

"Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness" - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

"I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble" - Agatha Christie

"Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable. Anton Chekhov

"Remove idleness from the world and soon the arts of Cupid would perish" - Francois Rabelais

“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” ― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.” ― Albert Camus

“Inventory: "Four be the things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe. Four be the things I'd been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt. Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne. Three be the things I shall have till I die: Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.” ― Dorothy Parker, The Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker

“I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.” ― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spend in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days. In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness.” ― C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“For his part, Blind Seer had no difficulty accepting idleness. A wolf proverb stated: “Hunt when hungry, sleep when not, for hunger always returns.” ― Jane Lindskold, Through Wolf's Eyes

"From its very inaction, idleness ultimately becomes the most active cause of evil; as a palsy is more to be dreaded than a fever. The Turks have a proverb which says that the devil tempts all other men, but that idle men tempt the devil." - Charles Caleb Colton

"If you are idle you are on the way to ruin, and there are few stopping places upon it. It is rather a precipice than a road.F Henry Ward Beeche

"An idle brain is the devil’s workshop - English Proverb

"Shun idleness. It is a rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals" – Voltaire

"There is one piece of advice, in a life of study, which I think no one will object to: and that is, every now and then to be completely idle, to do nothing at all" – Sydney Smith

"Idleness is an appendix to nobility." – Robert Burton

"Better sit idle than work for nought." – Scottish Proverb

"Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything" – Floyd Dell

"Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness-the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected." – George MacDonald

"Idleness is the burial of a living man" – Jeremy Taylor

"Blessed is the man that has found his work. One monster there is in the world, the idle man" – Thomas Carlyle

"There is also an honest and necessary idleness whereby good men are made more apt and ready to do their labors and vocations whereunto they are called." – John Northbrooke

Idle people are often bored and bored people unless they sleep a lot are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time. – Renata Adler

An idler is a watch that wants both hands; As useless if it goes as when it stands. – William Cowper

The frivolous work of polished idleness. – James Mackintosh

To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle wise people are diligent. – Guatama Buddha

He that is busy is tempted by but one devil; he that is idle by a legion. – Thomas Fuller

Idleness is an appendix to nobility. – Robert Burton

Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds. – Philip Dormer Shanhope Lord Chesterfield

The devil tempts all other men but idle men tempt the devil. – Proverb

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by. – Sir James Matthew Barrie

The hardest work of all doing nothing. – Malcolm S. Forbes

Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and parliaments. If we can get rid of the former we may easily bear the latter. – Benjamin Franklin

From https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/top10facts/954058/International-Day-of-Idleness-Argentina-facts 1. The 19th-century Prime Minister Lord Melbourne praised “masterful inactivity” as a virtue of good leadership. 3. A recent survey reported that UK workers spend 36 per cent of their time unproductively. 5. “It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.” Jerome K. Jerome. 6. “As a rule successful men are by habit comparatively idle.” Arnold Bennett (1867–1931). 7. Sloth became a Deadly Sin in the early 17th century. Earlier, the sin was known as Accidie, which was a rejection of one’s duties towards God. 8. “I’m not lazy, I’m energy efficient.” (slogan seen on a fridge magnet portraying a sloth). 9. Asteroid 9620 Ericidle is named after Monty Python star and author of Spamalot, Eric Idle. 10. “It is sweet to do nothing.” (Italian proverb).

From [38] Page 27... Boys were safe from overuse of (mental) energy because,"it is well known that most boys, especially at the period of adolescence, have a habit of "healthy idleness" - (Board of Education 1923:120)

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

[edit]
Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 384-85.
  • Idleness is emptiness; the tree in which the sap is stagnant, remains fruitless.
  • Diligenter per vacuitatem suam.
    • In the diligence of his idleness.
    • Book of Wisdom, XIII. 13. (Vulgate LXX).
  • The frivolous work of polished idleness.
  • Difficultas patrocinia præteximus segnitiæ.
    • We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty.
    • Quintilian, De Institutione Oratoria, I. 12.
  • Blandoque veneno
    Desidiæ virtus paullatim evicta senescit.
    • Valor, gradually overpowered by the delicious poison of sloth, grows torpid.
    • Silius Italicus, Punica, III. 580.
  • L'indolence est le sommeil des esprits.
  • There is no remedy for time misspent;
    No healing for the waste of idleness,
    Whose very languor is a punishment
    Heavier than active souls can feel or guess.
  • But how can he expect that others should
    Build for him, sow for him, and at his call
    Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?
  • Worldlings revelling in the fields
    Of strenuous idleness.
  • Idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • Idleness is like the nightmare; the moment you begin to stir yourself you shake it off —Punch, 1853
  • Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen —Jerome K. Jerome
  • An idler is a watch without both hands, as useless if it goes as when it stands —William Cowper - This is modified from the original which reads “A watch that wants both hands.”
  • A lazy man is like a filthy stone, everyone flees from its stench —The Holy Bible/Apocrypha
  • "And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class- the military" – Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Book Seven: 1810-11 - Chapter I [39]
  • The Ox saw what was being done, and said with a smile to the Heifer: "For this you were allowed to live in idleness, because you were presently to be sacrificed. – Aesop, Fables, The Heifer and the Ox [40]
  • To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil. – Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter LXII [41]
  • Mighty Love the hearts of maidens Doth unsettle and perplex, And the instrument he uses Most of all is idleness. – Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Chapter XLVI. [42]
  • the chief thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, IX [43]
  • There are regrets, memories, the instinctive longing for the departed idleness, the instinctive hate of all work. – Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea, II. [44]

As vice

[edit]

As virtue

[edit]

• In Praise of Idleness - Gary S. Francis https://www.onlinejcf.com/article/S1071-9164(11)00002-9/fulltext

  • Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idleness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. - Mark Slouka, "Quitting the paint factory: On the virtues of idleness". Harper’s, November 2004.
  • A Stanford psychologist explains why spacing out and goofing off is so good for you - Washington Post

Searches

[edit]

Guardian articles

[edit]
  • 'Idleness is good' [45]
  • Hours of Idleness [46]
"The most pernicious reform introduced into higher education over the last 40 years is "continuous assessment" (also called course unitation and modularisation). It is the pedagogic equivalent of CCTV, a monitoring and measuring of student performance from freshman to finalist. Traditionally, you slacked for eight terms and worked like stink through the ninth, "revising" for the nightmare of finals week. Now you are examined from your first undergraduate essay onward. Hell starts on day one. Modularisation does for higher education what the conveyor belt did for automobile manufacture. No more hours of idleness. And, I fear, fewer like Chris Martin and Chris Nolan." - John Sutherland

brief history of idleness [47]

Ivanova-Stenzel, Radosveta; Kübler, Dorothea (2005) "Courtesy and idleness: gender differences in team work and team competition"

Language versions

[edit]

Wikipedia language versions on idleness...

  • German
  • [48]
  • [49] – comprehensive on ancient romans plus other good stuff
  • The Dream of the Doctor (Temptation of the Idler) by Albrecht Dürer 1498/1499. "The devil is using bellows to blow thoughts of vice into the lazy man's ear, as the medieval proverb warns: 'Sloth is the devil's ear'" while "Cupid, mounting a pair of stilts, tries to climb onto the wobbly sphere of fortune".[27]
    The Dream of the Doctor (Temptation of the Idler) by Albrecht Dürer 1498/1499. "The devil is using bellows to blow thoughts of vice into the lazy man's ear, as the medieval proverb warns: 'Sloth is the devil's ear'" while "Cupid, mounting a pair of stilts, tries to climb onto the wobbly sphere of fortune".[27]
  • Idleness - Jacob Matham 1571–1631
    Idleness - Jacob Matham 1571–1631
  • Father Time with a personification of negligence and idleness, Crispijn van de Passe (I), after Maerten de Vos, 1589 - 1611
    Father Time with a personification of negligence and idleness, Crispijn van de Passe (I), after Maerten de Vos, 1589 - 1611
  • Temperance, one of the seven virtues (Bruegel 1560). Bruegel may have intended temperance (moderation) as the antidote to sloth.[28]
    Temperance, one of the seven virtues (Bruegel 1560). Bruegel may have intended temperance (moderation) as the antidote to sloth.[28]

References

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  1. ^ Rabinbach, Anson (1992) The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity University of California Press. ISBN 9780520078277 – see Chapter 1, "From Idleness to Fatigue", pages 19–44.
  2. ^ Horn, Andreas; Ostwald, Dirk; Reisert, Marco; Blankenburg, Felix (2013). "The structural-functional connectome and the default mode network of the human brain". NeuroImage. 102: 142–151. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.09.069. PMID 24099851.
  3. ^ Garrity, A.; Pearlson, G. D.; McKiernan, K.; Lloyd, D.; Kiehl, K. A.; Calhoun, V. D. (2007). "Aberrant default mode functional connectivity in schizophrenia". Am. J. Psychiatry. 164: 450–457. doi:10.1176/ajp.2007.164.3.450.
  4. ^ Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères (1688), "Du mérite personnel", Aphorism 12.
  5. ^ Sloth (Desidia), from the series The Seven Deadly Sins. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 16 September 2018.
  6. ^ Klein, H. Arthur (Ed.) (2014) Graphic Worlds of Peter Bruegel the Elder. Courier Corporation, page 114. ISBN 9780486795416.
  7. ^ Gibson, Walter S. (2006) Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter. University of California Press, page33. ISBN 9780520245211
  8. ^ Garrison, C. G., Burke, A., & Hollingworth, L. S. (1917). "The psychology of a prodigious child". Journal of Applied Psychology, 1(2), 101–110. doi:10.1037/h0070864
  9. ^ Alain Coulombel, The company and time: Figures of yesterday and today, Editions L'Harmattan, 2011, pages 100–101
  10. ^ a b Brown 2007, p. 1.
  11. ^ a b Deacy 2008, p. 145.
  12. ^ a b Aghion, Barbillon & Lissarrague 1996, pp. 193–194.
  13. ^ Jones, Peter (2017) Medieval homelessness and moral judgment Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
  14. ^ Schülting, Sabine (2016) "Review: Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature.", Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik,41 (1): 69–72.
  15. ^ HARJAN, GEORGE (1976-01-01). "Dobroliubov's "What is Oblomovism?": An Interpretation". Canadian Slavonic Papers. 18 (3): 284–292. JSTOR 40866920.
  16. ^ Thomson, James (1730) The Seasons and the Castle of Indolence. Wentworth Press, page 139 (reprint). ISBN 9781363523856
  17. ^ Childs, M.C. (2008) "Storytelling and urban design". Journal of Urbanism, 1(2): 173–186. doi:10.1080/17549170802221526
  18. ^ Durrell, Lawrence (2012) Collected Poems 1931-74;; Faber & Faber. ISBN 9780571288809
  19. ^ Barker, C., 2013. Australian archaeologists in Cyprus: Over eight decades of historical investigations on a Mediterranean Island. Teaching History, 47(1), p.32.
  20. ^ Michael Given (1997) "'Father of his landscape': Lawrence Durrell's creation of landscape and character in Cyprus". Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal, 5:55–63.
  21. ^ Miller (1939)
  22. ^ Matilde Battistini, 2005, page 278.
  23. ^ Midsummer night love potion proves a work of fiction, Telegraph, 14 February 2002.
  24. ^ Gardner 23-24, note 5.
  25. ^ Gardner 106, note 7.
  26. ^ The Sluggard (Watts) wikisource.
  27. ^ Battistini, Matilde (2005) Symbols and Allegories in Art. Getty Publications, page 284. ISBN 9780892368181
  28. ^ Klein, H. Arthur (Ed.) (2014) Graphic Worlds of Peter Bruegel the Elder. Courier Corporation, page 132. ISBN 9780486795416.
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